Overfishing, pollution and climate change are pushing the world's oceans
to the brink of a mass extinction of marine life on a scale
unprecedented in human history, a group of scientists warned Monday,
according to AFP.

Dying coral reefs, biodiversity damaged by invasive species, toxic
algae blooms, ever-larger open-water "dead zones" and the depletion of
stocks of big fish are all accelerating, the scientists said in a report
compiled during an April meeting in Oxford of 27 of international ocean
experts.

The panel was convened by the International Programme on the State of
the Ocean (IPSO), and brought together specialists from different
disciplines, including coral reef ecologists, toxicologists, and
fisheries scientists.

The IPSO report will be formally released later this week.

Three main factors are involved in the deterioration of the global
marine environment, and all are a direct consequence of human activity:
global warming, acidification and a dwindling level of oxygen, a
condition known as hypoxia, AFP said.

Up until recently, different factors that were thought to have a
negative impact on the oceans and on marine life had been studied mainly
in isolation. Scientists are only now starting to understand how these
forces interact.

The oceans are degenerating far faster than anyone had predicted, the report says, because of the cumulative effect of the combination of individual stresses,
the Independent said. The coming together of these factors is now
threatening the marine environment with a catastrophe "unprecedented in
human history," according to the report.

"The findings are shocking," said Alex Rogers, IPSO's scientific director and professor of conservation biology at Oxford University. As we considered
the cumulative effect of what humankind does to the oceans, the
implications became far worse than we had individually realized. We've sat in one
forum and spoken to each other about what we're seeing, and we've ended
up with a picture showing that almost right across the board we're
seeing changes that are happening faster than we'd thought, or in ways
that we didn't expect to see for hundreds of years."

The accelerated changes include the melting of the Greenland and
Antarctic ice sheets, a rising sea level, and the release of methane
trapped in the sea bed.

The panel suggested that the potential extinction of a variety of
marine species, from large fish to tiny corals, is comparable to the
five great mass extinctions of life on the planet, reaching back more
than 500 million years, the Independent said. Each of those mass
extinctions, AFP said, was preceded by many of the same conditions the
scientists are seeing afflicting the ocean environment.

And these symptoms could be the harbinger of wider disruptions in the interlocking pattern of life on Earth.

The scientists said the challenges
facing the oceans created "the conditions associated with every
previous major extinction of species in Earth's history," according to
the Guardian.

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